Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

When you use Readicate, we collect information you provide directly:

• Account information (email, display name, username)
• Reading highlights and annotations you create
• Books and book files you add to your library
• Profile information you choose to share
• Comments, reactions, and social interactions
• Private messages you send and receive, along with their read, edit, and deletion status
• Answers you voluntarily provide in product and pricing surveys
• Answers you give when we email you a feedback question, kept with your account so we can reply to you and tell you what changed. They are deleted with your account, or sooner if you ask at hello@readicate.com

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Provide and personalize the Readicate experience
• Generate AI-powered insights about your reading patterns
• Build your intellectual identity profile
• Connect you with like-minded readers
• Create flashcards, summaries, and learning tools
• With your permission, train and improve Readicate's own AI (see section 5)
• Verify when readers possess the same exact text version without matching on title alone
• Send notifications about activity relevant to you
• Conduct pre-launch product, customer, feature-priority, AI/privacy trust, adoption, and pricing research
• Review the labels you write yourself under “Other” on a highlight, without your name or the passage, to improve the list of labels offered to every reader

3. Private Book Uploads and Exact-Text Matching

When you upload a DRM-free EPUB or PDF, Readicate processes the file to provide the private reader. For exact-text matching, the server also derives keyed fingerprints and structure-only sentence coordinates. The shared-reading database stores those digests and coordinates, not the source prose. A separate shadow copy is encrypted by the application before it is placed in owner-isolated storage.

Matching fingerprints can establish that two readers have the same normalized text version. They do not give another reader access to your uploaded file. Readicate does not turn a private upload into a reusable catalogue asset; reusable delivery requires a separately acquired public-domain, licence, or rights-holder basis. Different translations, abridgements, or parser structures are not silently joined at sentence level.

Readers verified against the same exact text version may see sentence-level activity. A public highlight can show your display name and profile image when available. A non-public highlight contributes only an anonymous reader count; it does not expose your selected text, note, identity, or timestamp. A public sentence comment shows its text, your display name and profile image when available, and can receive replies. A private sentence comment is visible only to you and is excluded from every other reader's results and counts. You can delete your own sentence comments from the reader. When a public comment already has replies, deletion removes your text and displayed identity but keeps a neutral placeholder so other readers' replies are not erased. Verified readers can hide a public comment from their own shared-reading view or hide it and save a private safety flag for possible follow-up. A safety flag does not guarantee staff review. These choices are not shown to other readers. A saved safety flag is linked to your account and keeps the comment reference, flag state, and created/updated times while that comment exists; it does not copy the comment body into the flag record.

4. Voluntary Product Surveys

The Early Reader Study is separate from Readicate's academic-research and model-training permissions. Agreeing to the survey does not grant either permission. We do not ask for or store your name or email in the survey response, and we do not store your IP address with your answers. Hosting and security providers may process connection information such as IP addresses transiently to operate and protect the service.

If you are already signed in when you participate, we link your account ID to support response continuity, suppress further invitations after completion, and create aggregate segments. Anonymous participation is supported. Because an anonymous response has no email identity, an anonymous completion cannot be matched to an email address for invitation suppression.

While you remain signed out, you can delete an anonymous response from the survey page while the browser's survey cookie remains available. If that cookie is lost, neither Readicate support nor an email address can identify the anonymous row. After you sign in, the authenticated account path takes precedence and the survey page does not expose the prior anonymous row; that row remains subject to the 12-month deletion deadline. Signed-in respondents can delete their linked response while authenticated. Deleting an account also deletes its linked raw survey response.

Raw survey responses are retained for 12 months and then deleted. Non-identifying aggregate statistics may be retained after raw responses are deleted. To request deletion or exercise your data rights, email hello@readicate.com.

5. How Readicate Uses AI

Readicate uses AI to turn your reading into insight. It analyzes your highlights and reading patterns to create insights, vocabulary extractions, thought sparks, and your intellectual profile. This processing is part of providing the service to you, and it happens securely.

Training Readicate's own AI. We are building our own AI, designed to understand how people interpret, connect with, and respond to what they read. With your permission, your highlights, notes, and reading activity can help train and improve it. Your name, email address, payment details, and private messages are never used for training.

Your permission comes first. None of your reading is used for training unless you agree, and saying no never limits what you can do on Readicate. You can withdraw your permission at any time by writing to hello@readicate.com. From then on, your reading is left out of all future training. A model that has already been trained cannot unlearn what it has seen, which is why we ask before, not after.

Our AI providers. We do not allow the AI service providers that help power Readicate's features to train their own models on your data.

6. Data Sharing and International Processing

We do not sell your personal information. Your data may be shared:

• With verified co-readers based on your privacy settings (public highlights, public sentence comments, and profile identity)
• With AI service providers for feature processing
• With hosting providers (Vercel, Supabase) for infrastructure
• With our email delivery provider (Resend) to send account, welcome, reminder, invitation, feedback request, and digest emails
• When required by law

Readicate's primary Supabase production database is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany, in AWS region eu-central-1. This keeps the database records stored by Supabase in the European Union. Separate infrastructure and AI providers may process limited data in other countries when a feature requires it. Where international transfers occur, Readicate relies on the safeguards described in the applicable provider agreements and data-protection law. Contact us for information about the safeguards relevant to your data.

7. Your Privacy Controls

You can control your privacy through Settings:

• Toggle visibility of your bio, highlights, flashcards, reading stats, and progress
• Export all your data at any time
• Delete your account and associated data

8. Data Security

We use industry-standard security measures including encrypted connections (HTTPS), Row Level Security (RLS) on our database, and secure authentication via Supabase Auth.

9. Contact and Deletion Requests

For privacy questions or data requests, contact us at hello@readicate.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection authority, such as the one in the country where you live.